Robert Mitchum film kicks off Japan Society Yakuza series
THE YAKUZA (Sidney Pollack, 1975)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Wednesday, March 9, $12, 7:30
Series runs March 9-19
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org
One of Hollywood’s first forays into the Japanese underworld has quite a pedigree — directed by Sydney Pollack (coming off his success with The Way We Were) and written by Robert Towne (who had just scribed Chinatown and Shampoo) and Paul Schrader (his first writing credit, to be followed by Taxi Driver). The great Robert Mitchum stars as Harry Kilmer, a WWII vet who returns to Japan thirty years later to help his friend George Tanner (Brian Family Affair Keith), whose daughter has been kidnapped. Kilmer thinks he can just walk in and walk out, but things quickly get complicated, and he ends up having to take care of some unfinished business involving the great Keiko Kishi (The Twilight Samurai). Kilmer and his trigger-happy young cohort, Dusty (Richard Logan’s Run Jordan), hole up at Oliver’s (Herb “Murray the Cop” Edelman), where they are joined by Tanaka (Ken Takakura) in their battle against Toshiro Tono (Eiji Hiroshima Mon Amour Okada) and Goro (James Flower Drum Song Shigeta) while searching for a man with a spider tattoo on his head. There are lots of shootouts and sword fights, discussions of honor and betrayal, and, in the grand Yakuza tradition, the ritual cutting off of the pinkie. The Yakuza kicks off the Globus Film Series “Hardest Men in Town: Yakuza Chronicles of Sin, Sex & Violence” on March 9 and will be followed by a Q&A with Schrader.
Takashi Miike will be at Japan Society on March 15 to introduce his 1999 Yakuza film, DEAD OR ALIVE
The series continues March 10 with the U.S. premiere of Onibi: The Fire Within (Rokuro Mochizuki, 1997), which will feature an introduction and lecture by Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice. On March 11, the screening of The Wolves (Hideo Gosha, 1971) will be followed by a Gangsta Party with High Teen Boogie. March 12 is “Honor Amongst Ruffians Saturday or: The Films You’ll Never Ever Find on DVD . . . Ever,” including the international premieres of The Walls of Abashiri Prison (Pt 3): Longing for Home (Teruo Ishii, 1965) and Brutal Tales of Chivalry (Kiyoshi Saeki, 1965), while March 13 is “A Dog-Eat-Dog World Sunday,” with screenings of three films, including Youth of the Beast (Seijun Suzuki, 1963). On March 15, the great one himself, Takashi Miike, in town for a five-day retrospective at Lincoln Center, will introduce his apocalyptic Dead or Alive (1999).The series concludes on March 19 with the New York premiere of Takeshi Kitano’s 2010 Yakuza thriller, Outrage: The Way of the Modern Yakuza. If you’ve never seen a Yakuza movie, you’re in for a treat. No mere ripoff of American gangster pictures, Yakuza films focus on a whole different level of honor and betrayal, violence and revenge.
Takashi Miike’s ICHI THE KILLER is a faithful adaptation of Hideo Yamamoto’s hit manga. When Boss Anjo goes missing while beating the hell out of a prostitute, his gang, led by Kakihara (Tadanobu Asano, star of the beautiful MABOROSI), a multipierced blond sadomasochist, tries to find him by threatening and torturing members of other gangs. As the violence continues to grow — including faces torn and sliced off, numerous decapitations, innards splattered on walls and ceilings, body parts cut off, and self-mutilation — the killer turns out to be a young man named Ichi (Nao Omori), whose memory of a long-ago brutal rape turns him into a costumed avenger, crying like a baby as he leaves bloody mess after bloody mess on his mission to rid the world of bullies. This psychosexual S&M gorefest, which is certainly not for the squeamish, comes courtesy of the endlessly imaginative Miike, who trained with master filmmaker Shohei Imamura and seems to love really sharp objects. The excellent — and brave — cast also includes directors Sabu and Shinya Tsukamoto and Hong Kong starlet Alien Sun.
We love this flick. Takashi Miike incorporates claymation and musicals into this terrific tale of the Katakuris, a family that moves to the middle of nowhere to run a country inn. The only problem is that when guests finally arrive, they all end up dead — in bizarre, ridiculous ways — and the father decides to bury them instead of reporting the incidents, in order to protect the inn. Miike (ICHI THE KILLER, AUDITION, THE GREAT YOKAI WAR) masterfully mixes comedy, romance, music, murder, and mayhem in this enormously entertaining and highly original movie that is filled with a never-ending bag of surprises. Don’t miss it. These screenings are part of the 92Y Tribeca’s Takashi Miike series, which includes AUDITION on October 16 and ICHI THE KILLER on October 23 and 29.